


Embroideries

by meredyd



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-26
Updated: 2012-08-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 23:23:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/496817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/pseuds/meredyd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tomorrow she'll carry these things with her, and say goodbye to the rest of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Embroideries

The evening before Asami packs in haste. Korra offers to help, a little gingerly, and it makes Asami's composure shake just enough that she refuses.

Mako doesn't offer, and that does nothing to her composure at all. She wishes she was more surprised.

Here in her hands, in folds of fabric and the clatter of metal and beads, is her life.

Tomorrow she'll carry these things with her, and say goodbye to the rest of it.

\---

When Mako teases her about how much she's brought she laughs in the way she has always known how, to show how little it stings.

\---

Asami and her mother are getting ready to go out. A big party of her father's. She's prepared to be bored. But watching her mother get ready is never boring. It's the best part of anything.

It’s a kind of magic Asami doesn’t quite understand. Something her mother can do no matter how her day has gone, and today it has not gone well. Asami heard her parents fighting, in the raised whispers they used when trying not to let her hear. Afterwards, her mother had been crying, although Asami knew that too was meant to be a secret.

Now her mother is applying smooth makeup to her blotchy face, and swing music is playing on the radio, the kind she is teaching Asami to dance to. She is pinning up her dark curls with one hand and doing her lipstick in a long smooth motion with the other. It is like a kind of dance, in itself.

“Would you like to pick out my dress?” she asks, and Asami is nodding before the sentence is even over. Her mother’s closet is a treasurebox of bright jewels and rifling through them gives her a little thrill of pleasure every time. 

“This one,” says Asami, holding up her favorite qipao. It is the same green as their eyes, Asami’s and her mother’s, with small leaves of red and black. 

“Just the one I would have picked.” And she says this each time, but each time Asami glows with pride.

—

Mornings with Korra and Tenzin’s family are much louder than what Asami has been used to. Everything with Tenzin’s family is much louder, and much different, than what Asami has been used to. But her room is her’s alone, and she takes advantage of the times things have slowed enough for her to be in it. 

Everything is still in suitcases and boxes that she has not yet brought herself to put away. 

She does her makeup at the little wooden table with second-natured skill. Her eyes are puffy, she notices with distaste. Thin walls and little sleep, long nights patrolling with the Avatar. Too much thinking about things that should be put away in the past, until the city is at peace.

A silk jacket, an embroidered skirt, her driving gloves and boots, a supple leather. She gleams in red.

 

“You always look so lovely,” Pema says to her, as they pass each other on her way out of her room.


End file.
